Pae White | Sculpture Magazine | Kim Beil
Whistleblower (detail), 2019. Ink, cable, and electroplated steel, 3189 discs, 295 strands, 84.5 x 189 x 74 in.
She leads me to a series of freestanding cases, nearly 30 feet in length, which house AGAMEMNOMICS (2013). Hundreds of small, multicolored objects stand in regiments, organized in rows that repeat deep into the mirrored base of the vitrine. This is a selection of work made for White’s intervention at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK). She recalls, “I went down to the basement [at the MAK], and there were these insanely incredible pieces by Adolf Loos and Koloman Moser that I was supposed to consider doing an intervention with, but I kept looking at this box of toys in the darkness of a cabinet. Some were kind of broken. I realized they were never going to be seen because they didn’t have any attribution. I felt immediately protective and melancholic about the toys and so I took them as my subject.” As in the Velveteen Rabbit, White’s attention to these objects brings them new life.
Describing the project’s early stages, she explains: “I narrowed down the box of toys to an easy matrix, sort of a chess set, then assigned each object its role in the chess configuration.